• Nick Clegg has a penchant for Samuel Beckett, and finally we know why. According to Whitehall tittle-tattle, the poor man is trapped inside his own Beckettian drama: Waiting for the Car Pool – the contents of which, we should note, have been flatly denied by his office. Last month, rumour asserts, Clegg was late for a train to Merseyside. Naturally, his assistants sent for a motorised escort. After a nailbiting delay, the car arrived. But which car? Alas, this was no ministerial Jaguar. This was the rather drearier, if greener, Toyota Prius. No matter, said Nick – no car snob he. I'm late, he presumably cried: take me to Euston. Nothing doing, he was told. A minister of Clegg's rank cannot travel via Toyota. So back went the Prius, and in its place came the stately Jaguar. But to no avail. The train had left.

• As previously noted, Team Clegg would like to stress that this event is entirely fictitious. "This did not happen," says a communicant, "because it would not happen." And why would it not? "We do not order cars in that way." Unfortunately, for security reasons, our friend would not divulge precisely which ways a car might alternatively be ordered. Telepathy?

• Elsewhere in motoring, scarcely believable scenes at London's City Hall. Assembly member Brian Coleman – scourge of firemen, connoisseur of the hansom cab – appears to have tightened his purse strings, if not his belt. Once criticised for expensing £10,334 on taxis in a single year, Coleman has kept this year's outgoings to just £189.65. Or has he? Closer inspection of his parallel expense account at the capital's fire authority, which he chairs, suggests the burden is merely shifted elsewhere – to the tune of £3,367.27. The biggest culprit? Car journeys. All 80 of them, not least a £40.34 round-trip from Southwark to Westminster. It's five minutes on the Jubilee line.

• Speaking of the Jubbly, it seems it's the subject of a bitter literary dispute. "Thatcher said," writes Ken Livingstone in his latest memoir, "there was no question of spending hundreds of millions on extending the Jubilee line." Not so! claims Boris Johnson's Life of London. "I believe the Thatcher government can surely take the credit." Funny, that.

• To the barricades, comrades! Or should that be the orangerie? The Greek police seem to think so. Ahead of last Sunday's Greek independence day bash, the fuzz removed all fruit from the orange trees lining Syntagma Square, a hub of Athenian dissent. They feared, we must assume, those pesky anarchists might forgo molotovs for the day, and drench passing politicians with a few drops of citrus. What lemons.

• The Diary is often a sanctuary for. Verbless. Short sentences. That said, we admire verbosity in the work of others. Especially the work of Mr Justice Michael Peart, the Irish judge who opened a recent judgment with a practically Homeric sentence that spanned 215 words and at least 16 sub-clauses. For reasons of space, I cannot reproduce such Dickensian prose in one go. But in the spirit of Dickens, I hope to serialise the sentence throughout the week, starting today. First, though, some background: Eoin McKeogh is an Irish student who travelled to Japan last winter. In an extraordinary case of mistaken identity, he was wrongly accused of evading a taxi fare many miles away in Dublin. To preserve his good name, McKeogh temporarily won an injunction that prevented the press from linking him to the case. Which is where we come to Judge Peart, who, in a few words' time, will cruelly overturn said injunction: "Who would have thought when in the dark hours of the 13th November 2011 a young man got out of a taxi in Monkstown without paying the fare, that this would result in another young man, the plaintiff, who was thousands of miles away in Japan on that date, would discover on the 29th December 2011 after his return to this country, that …" And on this cliffhanger, with 122 words still to go, we bid our heroes a temporary adieu.